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Post by ASCENT on Oct 9, 2017 16:00:39 GMT -5
Elina Cartel vs Scarlett Anthem
Genesis Championship Match
Prompt — The mistake that became one of your greatest strengths.
RP Deadline is Friday, October 20th at 11:59 PM EST.
Segment Deadline is Saturday, October 21st at 11:59 PM EST. |
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Post by Scarlett Anthem on Oct 20, 2017 15:27:05 GMT -5
“God, please don’t let me fuck up,” I whispered under my breath while waiting in the gorilla position. I came down to the ring eventually triumph over Viola Wolff, but I was ready to congratulate if her she won. I promise you, none were more surprised than I was to have my hand raised after the three-count. And on my way backstage afterward I smirked proudly to myself and breathed, “I knew I could do it.” By the end of the night, in spite of sighting the ultimate prize Ascent has on offer and missing out on carrying it, that “I Can” grew stronger and more forceful inside my guts.
My mother used to say that ‘the posture of your attitude can drown you’. I didn’t really understand what it meant, but I think it had more to do with, like, the context of being ladylike. My mother wouldn’t approve of me climbing a ladder with my body on the line. Little did mom know that she was, at least in spirit, up on that ladder with me reminding me of all those annoying sayings she’d drilled into my memory. ‘Stand up straight even if you’re about to fall down’; ‘hope for the best, even if the best walking out the door with someone else.’
My mother made it easier to accept the fact that someone else walked out of the first Ascent event with the Genesis Championship. I mean can you imagine if I had won it in my first real competitive wrestling match? I mean, I can’t complain, I made it further than most. Was it disappointing to watch Elina Cartel win? Sure. But, I could argue I wound up with something infinitely more interesting and entertaining.
---
“Cause I got a golden tick-et! I got a golden tick-et! I got a golden tick-ET!” she sang in the back of the taxicab on the way home, doing her best Charlie Bucket impersonation and presenting the shiny gold foil ticket into the sunlight sparking through the windows. The cab driver cringed as she repeatedly sang the only words she knew, presenting the foil ticket in each direction and refusing to calm down or lower her volume.
“Do you know any other songs?” The cabbie diplomatically inquired.
“Not today, my good man,” Scarlett giggled and continued to examine and praise her prize through song.
She skipped out of the cab and up the front steps of her family home merrily, bursting into the door.
“I’m home, and I got a golden ticket!” She celebrated in a sing-song voice. It was visual validation she couldn’t wait to show off. They’d be so surprised, shocked even! To think she’d achieved so much in so little time by comparison to all of the other parent-sanctioned endeavors she’d ever attempted.
The house was quiet and dark. Scarlett straightened and quietly closed the front door behind her.
“Mom?” She blinked, and let her gym bag fall at the front step. It felt like ages since she’d been here, like she’d crossed a mountain, dipped through a yawning chasm and journeyed forever and a day to return with some level of triumph, triumph no one truly expected, were they honest. The darkened house felt unfamiliar, cold and unwelcoming as she glided into the kitchen expectantly to find no one. The search continued into the living room to find her mother, graying and older than she remembered stooped over her computer, squinting at the screen.
“Mom?” This frail shell in front of Scarlett was barely recognizable. She walked slowly, uncertainly, like she’d entered another dimension, one she couldn’t recognize, as she approached her mother who finally noticed her with a start.
“Scarlett?” Her mother squinted at her through thicker lenses than Scarlett remembered and fixed her hearing aids into her ears. “I barely recogni-- I didn’t hear you come in.”
Scarlett winced at what her mother initially was going to say.
“Are you okay?”
Scarlett swallowed and slipped the golden ticket into the waist of her pants for safekeeping.
No pockets = bullshit.
She’d show it later. She slipped onto the couch and watched her mother finish with the hearing aids and regard Scarlett almost blankly, with a cloud over her eyes.
“I’m sorry, what?”
Her mom looked old, really old, older than she remembered. How long had she been away? Only a few months, but sitting here now it felt like a few years.
“I—“
“You’re back already from your wrestling thing.” Her mother’s words felt vague and dim as they interrupted hers. Admittedly, when Scarlett had left for Portland her mother wasn’t expressing bright enthusiasm, but she didn’t look this worn and aged, either.
“I won, mom.” Scarlett murmured, gaining confidence just to say it, even if it lacked the whole truth. She had won. It was momentous.
“What?” Her mother responded, eyeing her more carefully. Scarlett tilted her head, confusion fixed on her face.
“I said, I won.” She raised her voice so her mother could hear her. Charlie Bucket never had to shout at Grandpa Joe…
“Oh, good,” her mother said, feigning congratulations. “Your brother called earlier. I guess school’s going really well for him. He’s expecting to qualify or a full scholarship.” Her mother’s hands found the computer mouse again, and she stooped over the screen as she spoke, clicking at something Scarlett couldn’t see.
“Oh,” Scarlett mumbled, feeling as though she’d just fallen from a great height. Her eyes drifted from watching her mother seemingly ignore her in favor of whatever facebook-centric game she was playing to the mantel where dusty family photographs sat.
It occurred to her, as she glanced at the furniture, and the television, and the end tables, that a layer of dust had begun accumulating on everything save the spot her mother sat on the couch. Cobwebs resided in the cracks where walls joined, and along the ceiling. Scarlett felt like she had entered the house of a ghost who had been dwindling into even less over the past few months.
“How you doing, mom?” Scarlett inched closer.
“What,” her mother mumbled, glancing at Scarlett for a moment, “are you here for dinner?”
Scarlett frowned, eyeing the screen where her mother inputted letters onto a computer Scrabble game feeling less and less like she should tell her mother about the golden ticket.
“Sure…” She swallowed feeling the dull thudding of her heart inside her chest, wondering if her mother could hear her response, and whether it mattered. After a moment waiting she stood up, biting the inside of her lip and left without being noticed and walked to the front foyer looking up into what once felt like a huge and full family home.
They got divorced when she was fifteen, but remained living in the house together until the kids were nearing points in their lives where departure seemed imminent. With her brother, Mark, away at school now, and her chasing after what they deemed to be foolish dreams, he moved out before she’d went to Portland. Her mother, years ago, had been diagnosed with Macular Degeneration, affecting the rods and cones that helped focus on fine details, and her hearing had been slipping for years. It was like a fun running joke. Over dinner she’d ask her dad how his day was, and her mother would pass her the milk. They laughed, and it seemed so distant.
The divorce had been stunning enough, but the impact was diminished by his continual presence. The finality of it finally occurred to her standing in the front foyer, finally noticing the empty shoe and coat racks at the front door. She looked through the doorway into the darkened living room at the glow of her mother’s computer screen and realized how quickly things had degenerated. The concern was dry Macular Degeneration turning to “wet” Macular Degeneration that would slowly take her mother’s sight from her. The hearing had never seemed so present, either, but some things seem to evade notice when you’ve got more important things to pay attention to. Here, now, reality was hitting her harder than any shot she’d taken in the Date with Destiny Ladder Match.
She padded silently up the stairs as if noticing the creaks of the wood for the first time, her hand slid along the coarse handrail, noticing everything for the first time in some kind of uninspiring newness that felt like it were shaking her shoulders and slapping her face with every step. At the top of the stairs, she moved for her room feeling a well of emotions stirring inside of her. With her bedroom door closed behind her, she flopped onto the bed, not minding the build-up of dust, and began to cry.
This was not the homecoming she’d expected, or hoped for.
---
I feel like you’re given this deck of cards when you’re born. It’s already shuffled, and it’s like a game of war you play against an invisible opponent. You lay a card down and it could be anything, not always what you’d want to play, but it’s the best thing you’ve got to work with, and you make the most of it, or you don’t. The cards fall out how they’re shuffled, and around the time you realize how little control you have over the flow of the game, is the time you realize you’re playing for higher stakes than you first imagined.
Or maybe it’s like you grow up with this thing you call normal. And then, the older you get, the further you step from it and open your eyes at what other people call ‘normal’ you start to realize what you missed, and how –not- normal it all was.
I don’t know.
I can’t really explain this feeling.
I feel like my world keeps growing, or my view of it keeps expanding, this past year especially. It’s like I used to see it under a microscope with a factor five magnification, but I keep zooming in and noticing more and more until I’m kind of wondering how I missed all that was going on.
I feel like I’m opening my eyes for the first time, you know?
On everything.
Grayse School didn’t prepare me for anything I faced in my first Ascent appearance. The crowd, the matches, the competition, I wasn’t ready for any of it. I’m not ready for anything I’m facing in life, right now, if I’m being fully transparent and honest. I feel like everything’s coming out of left field, and I’m woefully unprepared for it.
In wrestling, in combat, you’re supposed to prepare for your opponent.
You’re supposed to anticipate them. At least that’s what I was taught. You learn everything you can about them, you watch tape, you analyze their movements, figure out their tendencies and then go to work learning counters, and ways to overcome.
I’ve been doing that ever since I heard Elina Cartel had chosen me as her first opponent for the Genesis Championship.
All the pressure you can feel when it comes to a championship fight, added on to the fact it’ll be my first one, added on to the fact I’m facing a woman I respect, and have had the pleasure of not only watching compete, but have felt the sting of her punches, and that’s not really anything I haven’t been preparing for.
This is huge. It’s enormous. It’s an opportunity for one of us to cement a reign as champion, and for another, me, to take that belt away and hold it for myself.
And that’s not what’s making me nervous, at least not yet, here, before the bell. I’ve been watching Elina Cartel put on clinics in every match she’s fought in.
I’m confident that I may not be able to counter everything she has, but I have things of my own she won’t be ready for. I’m confident this fight won’t be easy for her. I’m confident in my chances to win it, but I won’t begrudge Elina if she retains.
And I won’t stop fighting if I lose. That's one thing I'm good at.
I’m afraid of the things I haven’t prepared for, though.
I’m afraid of what’s in left field.
I didn’t mean to turn this into some sort of confessional, but I hadn’t anticipated my mom not recognizing me when I went home. I had anticipated the disappointment, and ignorance, but to suddenly realize age was taking her knocked me for a loop.
What happens if I’m not prepared for the little things neither of us anticipates, Elina?
What if it’s not even a sharp take down that gets me, but a fall off the top rope?
I’m going to give you all the fight I have. I’m going to need it, that much I know.
But it’s the little things that kill. The devil, they say, is in the details.
What am I missing, that I’m going to regret later?
I have this funny idea in my head that you’re preparing for even those. That you’ve done this longer than me, and you’ve trained your way through an embarrassing slip on the ramp down to the ring, or devised a way to work through a simultaneous array of unexpected broken and stubbed toes. I don’t know what else could possibly happen cause it’s that ominous left field thing again!
My mom used to tell me in the face of everything that ‘no matter what you face, you gotta face it’. So maybe that’s the attitude I need here, a sort of ‘one for mom’ kinda thing where I do the things I do best, and this fear thing I feel in the pit of my tummy, fear of the unexpected, the unprepared-for, I need make that something I do best at too.
Good luck, Elina.
Expect the Unexpected.
I'm going to do my best.
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Post by Elina Cartel on Oct 20, 2017 23:07:58 GMT -5
Elina the Defender
How many fans are now looking at me as the next big thing? I’m not bearing a bloated ego; I’m just asking a simple question. I’ve heard it already, here and there, they call me Elina the Killer, Elina the Up and Comer. Elina the Champion. Those in the marketing department are already sizing me up to be the next big inspirational story for all the young girls in the world, lucky enough to be born into a world that might just refrain from holding them back.
It hasn’t always been this way.
There was a time....
I was just young. Young and silly and a dreamer. That kid who didn’t take anything too seriously, but made the grade, so she didn’t get hassled.
My best friend was this kid named Bobby. We were an interesting tandem. He was a smart kid, skinny, and easily the butt of every joke the older kids could come up with. Me? I was bigger than he was and back then, still enraptured in the idea of being a fighter.
I had been waiting for my opportunity to stand up for myself or someone else. I wanted to be the champion for all of my peers who couldn’t defend themselves. This want was pushed forward by the fact that the fifth and sixth graders were brutes. We were on the cusp of the technological revolution back then, yet we were still barbarians.
Bobby liked playing this game where we were astronauts who crash landed on a desolate planet with very little supplies and only our ‘wits’ to ensure our survival. He always wanted to play the character who had a ‘robot arm’ and he would use it to do ‘great feats of strength’. I enjoyed make believe, so I would be that wily female co pilot who added the spunk and comic relief. Either way, I loved living out these make believe adventures with Bobby.
There was definitely part of me that really wanted to live out that life. I knew I didn’t fit completely in with my peers and I thought I might find answers out there in and amongst the stars.
Bobby and I were traversing a vast desert on the planet ‘R-485’, which was the soccer field in reality, when we were confronted by five boys from a grade above us. None of them ever really liked us. Bobby was small and a ‘nerd’ and I was big and awkward and these boys hadn’t figured out that they ‘liked’ girls yet.
The ‘leader’ of the group was this kid named Kevin. I don’t know what happened to him after Elementary school, but at the time, he was the one who stepped up and pushed Bobby down to the ground and spit on him. The other boys laughed.
In the midst of it all, I decided that I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. All of those boys had been bulling us for months and it wasn’t getting any better. They were awful and in retrospect, I should have known that they acted the way they did because they were likely victims of the same treatment from somewhere else.
At the time it felt like they bullied us simply because they could, not because there was any reason behind it. They would point out anything they considered a ‘weakness’ or ‘abnormality’ and then it would turn into this group session where they ganged up on one person and unloaded on them. Like wolves, only without the organizational skills.
I stepped in between Bobby and Kevin and I reached back, and with as much strength I could muster, I punched him. I punched Kevin right in the nose and he fell back onto his butt and his palms. I felt, at the moment, like that champion who defended her peers. I felt good.
Kevin’s friends paused for a moment before they made a move. I just looked at them as they waited to be prompted by Kevin who finally told them to get me.
There was a moment where I was able to fight them off, but eventually they were able to overpower me and bring me down to the ground. Once I was down, with Bobby right beside me, they kicked us. Kevin got up and kicked me right in the head. They kicked us until they deemed we had been kicked enough.
That feeling of being the ‘champion defender of her peers’ went away painfully quick and I realized that I had made a mistake. It was a mistake to stand up to him when he was surrounded by all of his friends.
Bobby and I were on our backs in the middle of the soccer field, shattered out of our youthful imaginations.
Defeated.
It wouldn’t always be that way.
Scar Tissue
After a forty five minute wait I’m finally greeted by a nurse who ushers me back to the Neurologist’s office. My Neurologist’s name is Tom and he seems nice enough, he’s about my same age too, which makes me wonder if I’ve made the best choices in my own career. Inside his office is a bicycle which I assume he rides to and from work on. He’s wearing a green sweater vest and a white shirt, with khaki pants. He looks like that annoying neighbor from the Simpsons, but without all of the character-destruction.
“It’s good to see you again, Elina.” he says.
We sit down together with a table between us and he swivels his monitor around to show me my scans.
“The CT scan looks normal, but I did find some abnormalities in the MRI.”
My heart meets my throat, “Abnormalities?”
“Sorry, it’s not quite as alarming as it may sound.” I found that there’s some scar tissue in your motor cortex. It appears to be the result of head trauma, but it’s quite old. I would say, long before you started fighting.”
“Is this the ‘you have to quit fighting’ speech?”
He chuckles, “Not necessarily. We will run some more tests, but I believe the concussion was made worse by the fact that you had a head injury when you were young that went unnoticed. It likely explains the seizure you had as a result of the concussion.”
I forgot to mention that--I will not be driving for six months. Not that I drove, but I did like knowing that it was, at least, an option.
“How old an injury is it?”
He shakes his head, “It’s tough to tell, but I would say it’s at least ten or fifteen years old.”
“Wow.”
“I’m going to clear you to compete, but I will be seeing you again in a month and I’m ordering some more more imaging, we would like to focus on that spot and get a better look, ok?”
“Sounds good.”
We stand and he shakes my hand.
“Well, good luck, and watch yourself in the ring, ok? You’re clear to wrestle, but it would still be in your best interests to consider taking some time off.”
I can’t take time off. I have two championship belts and a t-shirt between the three promotions I work for. The t-shirt, well, that’s a long story.
“Thank you doc,” I smile.
He returns my smile, “Tom is fine.”
“Tom.”
Realization and Embarrassment
I’ve met up with Sonny, fresh after the doctor visit. We’re at a bistro. He’s having a cup of coffee and I’m regulated to Rooibos tea thanks to the fact that I may never be able to have caffeine again.
I’ve been venting.
Sonny gives me a quizzical look as he shakes his head, “I fail to see how a confrontation when you were in elementary school could ‘ruin your life’.”
I sigh “That’s just it, I didn’t know the position I was putting myself into, back then. I was trying to defend my friend. In reality, I was setting myself up for a fall in the future.”
“You could have hurt your head during a bicycle accident, a game, anything. What makes you think it was this particular event?” he asks.
“I can’t remember any other time where I took a blow to the head like that. It has to be that moment,” I set my mug down and yearn for a cigarette, “So stupid.”
Sonny shakes his head again, “You stood up for what you believed in. Yes, you were hurt, but think of the millions who go through their lives without ever standing up for themselves. You are, who you are today, because you stood up for yourself. Do not torment yourself. You should be proud.”
“Proud of giving myself brain damage?” I scoff.
“No, proud for standing up for yourself and your friend. You showed strength.”
“And ended my career before it ever began.”
“No. We will work on this very thing--protecting yourself. We can avoid this in the future.”
“I really hope so.”
To be continued.
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